Samurai Jack Drabbles
by 4fireking
Summary: A collection of stories in one fanfiction. The stories shift between centering around OC's to pure canon and their usually romance or adventure. (co-author Deirdre Skye).


**This first chapter was written by myself and Deirdre Skye. I knew about the cartoon when I was a kid because it was on Cartoon Network and being an easily excitable kid I watched it. It was the best episode of the network I watched that day and until now I didn't know it wasn't one of the top ten episodes of it. I picked a drabble for this fandom because there's so many stories that could be made for it because of the character, writing, and diverse world of Samurai Jack.  
**

XXX

The Sakura petals were landing on Jack's shoulders and his hair. He still kneeled down and prayed for Ashi to be in the afterlife. She may have lost the day she was born but she didn't lose her time experiencing the world.

Jack walked through the forest catching all the Sakura petals that fell gently into his arm. His hands were gentle despite clasping his sword a lot in the past and swinging through machine and flesh alike. If Ashi was with him she too would want to catch Sakura petals.

In some unguessable direction, in a distance immeasurable on any axis known to science, a young woman sat against the outer wall of a simple tomb and wept bitter tears. Six more stood at a respectful distance, letting their sister cry for the man she had loved. They remembered dying, and they remembered waking again on the grassy field; how that wonder had happened, they did not understand, only that it had something to do with Aku and Ashi, whose explanation had been confused at best. All they truly knew was that Aku was dead by the Samurai's hand, and Aku's final stroke had destroyed the samurai, and that Ashi had somehow come to love him, whatever that meant.

While Ashi was crying with her sisters Jack was learning from his mother who was writing all the things she was thankful for. She carried on like that until her husband and Jack's father put a blanket om her shoulder to help her with the shock, the shock of remembering Aku.

The Empress' handmaidens sat near, with tea and small biscuits ready, and instruments to hand if the Imperial family should wish some sort of distraction. Aku's sudden demise and their subsequent freedom had been a great relief, but also a wrenching dislocation to young women who had mostly grown up under Aku's tyranny, and in some ways, they'd actually had it worse than the labourers. Aku had, after all, had human minions and encouraged them to select "favourites." The "ruined" girls had been, by the decree of the Empress, appointed as servants to the nobility, with her and her husband taking in nearly a dozen in varying capacities.

Meanwhile, if that term meant anything, the Daughters of Aku watched their sister's tears, not sure whether to share her pain or disdain her weakness, and one of them lightly, carefully, took the hand of the one beside her. The other flinched, but accepted the touch, and did the same for the sister to her other side. Slowly, all six came to be holding hands lightly, the first gentle touch any of them could recall.

 **Twenty Years later**

Jack had two more people to mourn: his mother and his father the emperor and empress. From all the ways they could have died it was their bones getting to be brittle and they just didn't wake up anymore. It made Jack happy yet sad to see them holding hands on their big bed together.

At least they had gone together. There would be no lingering sadness for them, and he could arrange proper funeral... oh no. He quickly exited the room, and grabbed the first servant he found, one of his mother's handmaids it turned out. "Call the ministers together! We must arrange a proper coronation." He grabbed hold of his mother's other handmaid. "Fetch a priest. There must be a funeral readied." For with his parents' passing, Jack had become Emperor.

In the other world, far into the future and across the strings of if, the others Daughters approached their grieving sister. "Take our hands?" the one to her rightmost, Ami, asked, extending her hand as Aki held out hers. Ashi slowly, reluctantly, took the offered hands, and found herself almost pulled to her feet. Slowly, the others ran their hands up each other's arms, ending in a shared circular embrace. Slowly slowly, the tense young women relaxed slightly. A faint sound of shifting gravel pulled them out of the embrace and into full awareness, battlefield awareness as they readied their weapons.

The figure that emerged was clad in black, with familiar black robes and ink mask. Tall and slim and terrifyingly familiar, yet entirely different. For this shadow-clad figure walked with slow steps, hunched over slightly, head lowered. She walked to the door of the samurai's tomb, and laid a black-clad hand on it, lightly. "You were the stronger." She turned, slowly, to face her daughters. "I will not ask your forgiveness; I do not merit it. The cult is disbanded. I only wished to pay my respects to the samurai." She removed her mask, and set it down at the door before turning away.

Her respects were long as she had much to atone for praying to Aku and helping him deliver six children...no, six assassins whose births were all turmoil and struggle to live killing their enemy or die being mocked by their own father.

As their mother slunk off, the Daughters watched her with varying expressions. Ashi, surprising though it might have been, looked at her with only sadness. To her sisters she said softly, "Should we... help?"

Ashi was the first to help her by touching her shoulders. It was strange how the priestess could change temperature from cold to hot while Ashi was touching her. Seeing her cry made her wish she could have went to where Jack was now even if it was the afterlife.

Her mother slowly turned, and the sight of her face was a shock: it was her own. Older, but hers unmistakably. "Thank you, Ashi," the woman whispered. "I... I don't... I can never make up for... "

Ashi sighed heavily. "No. You can't. Perhaps, in time, we can forgive you. I don't know. But for now, where will you live?"

She looked away. "I don't know. Perhaps I can find a cave, it's not as if we're not all used to that," she said, still barely more than a whisper. "It's all I deserve after... "

"Probably," Ashi agreed. "But in my travels with the Samurai, I saw what families should be, and I want us to be like that, if we can be."

Deep down the priestess would like that. Ashi and her six other children were nothing like Aku, then again there was a non-genetic thing within them they didn't know about.

Before the priestess didn't know what love was. She didn't love her seven children until she realized the error of her ways. Now Aku was vanquished and love was spewing out of her eyes.

Even now she wasn't very clear on the concept. But then, neither were most of the Daughters. There were still tiny sparks of love and compassion in their hearts, but most of what filled them was pain, a pain so great they couldn't care about right and wrong, only about desperately trying to not hurt as much. Ashi took the lead here; though not able to held her mother close, she could take her hand and encourage her sister without words to take the other, the eight now making a circle. It was little enough; by most standards it was a sad and pathetic travesty of familial closeness, but their upbringings had left them all with so little capacity for any sort of attachment that even this threadbare excuse for it was nearly more than they could endure.

"What now?" one of the other sisters asked.

"We could return to the temple," the High Priestess suggested, reluctantly, slowly. "We would have shelter, water, and could get food from the forests."

"Perhaps if we sealed off the Hall of Worship?" another Daughter suggested, almost as reluctantly.

Ashi sighed heavily. "No. It was the only home we ever had, but it's not the kind of home we need. We need something completely different." She considered. "We need to find somewhere better to talk. Follow me, I have an idea." And with that, she led them to a place about a half-hour's walk distant, a sandy cove with a narrow beach between the water and the forest. "We can draw on the sand," she said. "I think we should build a house for us, a house where only we could reach, or perhaps the jump apes. Build it high up in the canopy," and she started to sketch in the sand. "In the branches of a live oak, perhaps. Above the ground, instead of under it. Wood instead of rock. Light and views everywhere instead of darkness. And most important, nothing of Aku. No masks, no idols, no robes, nothing of our former worship. Sisters, mother, you'll need to scrub off your darksuits. If we need them, we can create them. I an do it, and I'm sure you can as well."

The others struggled to imagine the strange things Ashi described. To live in such place seemed so strange.


End file.
